Madame was, in truth, perfectly sincere in her conversion; nevertheless, she carried into it something of her freedom of mind and her independence of temper. "On my arrival in France," she says, "they made me hold conferences about religion with three bishops. All three differed in their beliefs; I took the quintessence of their opinions and formed my own." In this catholic religion, thus defined in the rough, which she believed and practised in perfect good faith, there remained traces and several of the habits of her early faith. She continued to read the Bible in German. She mentions that at that period in France scarcely any one, even among the devout, read Holy Scripture. The translations recently made of it had led to such discussions and bitter quarrels that the ecclesiastical authority intervened and forbade the reading of them; which has ever since remained a rarity in our country. Madame was therefore a notable exception when, in her plan of life, she gave a great and regular place to meditation on the Holy Book. She selected three days in the week for that salutary practice. "After my son's visit," she writes (November, 1717), "I sat down to table, and after dinner I took my Bible and read four chapters of the book of Job, four Psalms, and two chapters of Saint John, leaving the other two till this morning." And she might have written the same thing on each of her appointed days. On one occasion she was singing unconsciously the Calvinist psalms, or the Lutheran canticles (for she mixed them up), while walking alone in the Orangery at Versailles, when a painter who was at work on a scaffolding came down hurriedly and threw himself at her feet, saying with gratitude: "Is it possible, Madame, that you still remember our Psalms?" The painter was a reformer and afterwards a refugee; she relates the little story very touchingly.